For our music video, to use the song “House of the Rising Sun” by the alternative rock band, Muse. This song was chosen as the genre of music is one which we mainly listen to, and watch music videos of, so we already had a rough understanding of what the video should be like. After watching many music videos (from a variety of genres such as RnB to rock) we understood what themes and style of video would be suitable for alternative rock. We discovered that alternative rock videos contain both abstract and narrative ideas, but they will mainly be based around a performance by the band. We decided that our video should be mainly performance, but felt that we should incorporate a narrative that is shown through abstract ideas. Our narrative may not be that clear at the first viewing, but it is shown through the performance of the topless figure (Dom). The narrative is based on our interpretation of the song’s lyrics, which we felt were about the character singing about a troubled past and warning people ‘not to do what I have done’. At the start of the video, Dom’s character is seen on the floor, struggling with his past troubles. Throughout the video, Dom’s character rises up from the floor to eventually stand up and escape the cellar. This represents his character rising up and leaving his past troubles behind. Our video can be seen to follow the conventions of a conventional alternative rock video with abstract and narrative ideas all intertwined within the performance. The poster that we created to promote our album follows the conventions of a real poster, with the large image of the album cover and a review from a magazine that represents the genre. For our digipak, we decided to use an image of the band on the front cover. This image has been given effects to make it have a similar feel to the music video itself. For the other images used for the digipak, we have used more images that are similar to shots in the music video. This is because in the album, there is a central theme running throughout based abound a central figure singing about his experiences. This central figure is Dom’s character in the video. The digipak follows the conventions of a normal digipak from the genre with a large image of the band on the front with the band name and album title, a back cover with the track listings, record company details and a barcode and images relating to the album. I think that our music video and ancillary tasks combine well to represent an alternative rock song and album. They do this because all of the tasks have the same setting, lighting and costumes and have the same colour scheme. The digipak and music video is very similar as some of the images are used on the digipak are based around different shots that we used on the video. The poster and the digipak are effective together as they use the same image, which is the front cover of the digipak. This means that the video and ancillary tasks together, are effective in promoting the song and album as they use similar images with the same themes and colour scheme.
In order to get audience feedback, we interviewed a group of people individually after they had watched our video. We asked the questions:
· What do you think of the mise-en-scene?
· What genre of music do you think this video represents?
· What do you like about the video and why?
· What do you dislike about the video and why?
Generally, we received positive feedback from people who had watched our video, but these responses had not been recorded. We decided to ask males for feedback, as this was our intended target audience, based on previous research about the genre of music we had chosen to do. We also asked fellow Media students to nit-pick and be harsh in their responses. We asked for this feedback prior to fully completing our video as this helped us to sort out any mistakes in our video. Once the video was complete, we asked the questions again and, again, received mainly positive feedback. For the first question, the main response we received was how the audience enjoyed the lighting and the costumes. This answer rolled into the second question as they said that the lighting, costumes and settings represents the alternative rock genre, which is the genre that we are representing. When asked the third question, the response was, again, positive and the individuals said that they liked the setting, lighting and costumes as it made it clear what type of video and genre we had created. The responses to the final question were mainly based around the role of Dom’s character, as the audience were confused as to what his role in the video is. This response is slightly what we hoped for as the narrative of Dom’s character is supposed to be told in an abstract way. Overall, I think that the responses we got were positive and were what we expected them to be.
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